Hip Chinese youngsters are turning in ever greater numbers to various forms of street dance.

Influenced by their counterparts in the West and, more recently, South Korea, the funky dance style is also reflected in an upsurge of advertising and the sweeping popularity of hip hop music in urban centres like Beijing.

Alive: Hip-hop works a Salsa revolution The style, sound and expression of black urban America is overtaking Latin American dance as Scotland’s latest fitness craze. By Tim Abrahams for The Times

Keep it real. Three little words that represent the promise made by hip-hop artists to the grounding principles of their music, keeping it real to their roots in an impoverished, predominantly black urban America.

Keeping it real is a sobering notion in a luxuriously panelled dance studio full of white twenty-something women wearing their keep-fit clothes.

SEATAC She has flown here for the weekend from Tallahassee, Fla., and paid $175 to dance and maybe somehow — among 300 others — be noticed by the big-time choreographers of "Monsters of HipHop," a traveling company that teaches and scouts for talent.

After that it's the intensity - the concentration - showing on the face of all of the dancers as they go round and round rehearsing their performance for the upcoming "Keeping Dance Alive" repertory concert, to be staged April 16-18 at Chico State University's Laxson Auditorium.

Richard ‘Crazy Legs’ Colón has been a veteran of Hip Hop and leading B-Boy since the late 1970’s. His Rock Steady Crew own the most recognisable name in the world of b-boying, often, inaccurately, referred to as break-dancing. Reporting on the PS2 B-Boy Championships Folu Merriman-Johnson for Dance Today! caught up with him.

Take a trip down music’s memory lane. Along the route of modern R’n’B, bypass pop music; take the detour past dance and trance. Motor past heavy metal, but if you hit Rock and Roll then you may have gone too far.

'4-ISH': Flying, Flopping, Leaping, Always Clownishly Humanby JENNIFER DUNNING for the New York Times

A wiry little guy wanders onto the stage at the start of "4-ISH," the New York debut show by the Dutch hip-hop and extreme sports group ISH. His spiky dreadlocks and slouching clothes suggest he is a hipster, but really he is one of life's cheerfully knowing clowns. Played by Marco Gerris, who founded ISH in 1999 and is its artistic director, the character plops to the floor and is surprised to discover his legs are forming a yoga position.

Other People’s Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America, By Jason Tanz, Bloomsbury, 288 pp., $24.95

....Tanz, an editor at Fortune Small Business, toggles between personal reminiscence (the tortured relationship between his whiteness and his love of hip-hop serves as both a point of entry and a leitmotif), punditry, and quite capable journalism. ....Tanz’s prose is lively, and he situates his subjects aptly within the larger context of hip-hop’s history, but his insights are seldom striking.

There's little room for shyness in a sweat-steamy studio at the Embarcadero YMCA, where a Freeplay Dance Crew rehearsal bumps and grinds into the night. But when the time comes to whip off his shirt, director Josh Klipp gets tentative.

"I'm finally going to lose these love handles," he jokes, with his hands poised haltingly on the hem of his tank top. He starts to peel the shirt, lowers it again, smiles. "This is a big step for me."

Break dancing is alive and well at Boston OlympicsMore than two decades have passed since break dancing burst into the living rooms of mainstream America, only to be just as quickly dismissed as a fad.

But boom bap beats and limb-bending body-rocking have never stopped, a fact that will be on full display this weekend when breakers from around the globe descend on South Boston for the fifth annual B-Boy Olympics.

Dancing warriors move to world beatI’m not a huge fan of war. But if I have to watch a bunch of countries fighting, hands down, my preferred brand of combat is the hip-hop-dance battle. It’s like one ferociously choreographed dance in an NFL end zone, only here both teams act like they just scored a touchdown. Everybody’s cocky. Everybody’s keyed up. .... The battles in Benson Lee’s documentary “Planet B-Boy” are exceptional.

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